Several verified Twitter accounts were hacked to impersonate Elon Musk on November 5 and one of them collected nearly $170,000.
After compromising the verified accounts, the scammers changed the name and profile picture to impersonate Tesla’s CEO. The scammers then published in threads of comments initiated by the real Elon Musk to give the impression of legitimacy. Some of the fraud tweets said that Elon Musk conducted “the world’s largest crypto-draw” for those using “Bitcoic” (Bitcoin) and provided a link to “participate” in the draw.
To bypass Twitter’s security measures, the scammers subtly changed one of the characters in the name while maintaining an ad name that seemed to be “Elon Musk” at a glance, preventing Twitter from automatically earmarking the account.
It is said that the hackers have compromised several different accounts, including those of film producer Pathe U.K. and US politician Frank Pallone Jr.
Daily animal reporter Lachlan Markay reported that sources from the Pallone campaign confirmed that the account had been pirated, but without saying a political goal: “It looks like a Bitcoin scam.
Later, it was added that one of the BTC purses used in the scams received $158,256 and that payments “continue”. At the time of going to press, the address mentioned by Markay had a closing balance of BTC 26.38 (USD 168,930).
In April, telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov twittered a warning and told his followers that the messaging application had suffered some downtime due to overheating of its server clusters. Durovs Tweet drew attention to fake fraudsters who posed as CEO of Telegram and claimed to offer crypto to users as a “thank you for your support”.
In January, Twitter saw an influx of Litecoin’s founder (LTC) imitators, “Charlie Lee”, with several scammers posing as creators of LTC and applying for a fake LTC gift. Most scammers used Twitter handlers with names very similar to the real Charlie Lee, @SatoshiLitez, like @SatoshiLitez and @SatoshiLitee_.